Inland by Kat Rosenfield: Guest Post

Callie Morgan has long lived choked by the failure of her own lungs, the result of an elusive pulmonary illness that has plagued her since childhood. A childhood marked early by the drowning death of her mother—a death to which Callie was the sole witness. Her father has moved them inland, away from the memories of the California coast her mother loved so much and toward promises of recovery—and the escape of denial—in arid, landlocked air.

But after years of running away, the promise of a life-changing job for her father brings Callie and him back to the coast, to Florida, where Callie’s symptoms miraculously disappear. For once, life seems delightfully normal. But the ocean’s edge offers more than healing air … it holds a magnetic pull, drawing Callie closer and closer to the chilly, watery embrace that claimed her mother. Returned to the ocean, Callie comes of age and comes into a family destiny that holds generations of secrets and very few happy endings.

Author Kat Rosenfield
Kat Rosenfield is a writer, illustrator, advice columnist, entertainment journalist, zombie enthusiast, and author of two YA novels: AMELIA ANNE IS DEAD AND GONE (Dutton, July 2012) and INLAND (Dutton in June 2014.) When not writing fiction, she can be found shamelessly gossiping about movies and celebrities as a contributor for MTV News, and offering relationship and life advice as the resident agony aunt on Barnes & Noble’s SparkLife.

Guest Post

What was the easiest scene to write? The most difficult?

The last pages of INLAND gave me so much trouble, and I’m still surprised by how it ended. It took a long time and a lot of conversation in order to come up with the last chapter before the epilogue; it was so hard to find a conclusion that was satisfying without being tidy, and unsettling without being bleak. But what’s really weird is that as hard as it was to come up with the idea for that chapter, it practically flew fully-formed from my head when it came time to actually write it down. So, that was an easy scene to write, but up until the point of writing, it was like pulling teeth.

The other part that was tough for me was Callie’s first kiss with Ben. “Romantic” is definitely not my natural setting — I’m much more comfortable writing about people doing terrible things to each other than I am writing about an incredibly tender moment like that — and the entire time I was working on that scene, I was completely and totally freaked out and constantly second-guessing myself. “Is this too cheesy? Not cheesy enough? Should I say something about tongues?”